How to decorate fairy cakes

Video guide to decorating fairy cakes

Fairy cake decorating techniques

I’m going to show you a few techniques on how to make perfectly decorated fairy cakes. We all know cupcakes but we’re going to bring back the good old British fairy cake. So what I’m going to show you is 4 different techniques using butter cream icing and some rolled out fondant icing.

Decorating fairy cakes with butter cream icing peaks

If you’re going to fill a piping bag all you need to do is put the piping bag, with the nozzle, into a jug and then you can open up the piping bag and you can fill it quite easily because your hands will be free.

So with your hand at the bottom using it to direct the piping bag and the hand at the top is doing the pressure to squeeze the icing out of the bag. So you want to make sure that the icing goes right up to the edge of the case. And make sure as much as possible that the icing bag is vertical. So with even pressure, slowly, just move the icing sugar around the edge. You’ve got plenty of time so don’t rush it.

And then go over the top half and then when you’ve finished ease off on the pressure and just pull the bag up. And you should get a lovely little peak like that. So you end up with a perfect little fairy cake. So that’s the first technique.

The second one I’m going to use a chocolate icing. This is the same butter cream icing. All I’ve done is added in some cocoa powder.

So taking another fairy cake, what I’m going to do is a rosette pattern. So again keeping the piping bag quite upright and again using this lower hand to direct the bag and again the upper hand to squeeze. So what you want to do is push down and then ease off the pressure and pull away. And just keep doing that around the fairy cake. Move it slightly with your hand rather than moving the piping bag and then pull away. As you do it and you get more practice it becomes easier and easier. And again just keep rotating round. And you can do a double layer if you wanted to. But I’m just going to do a single layer.

And what we’re going to do to finish off the middle bit is just do a big rosette in the middle so squeeze a bit harder and pull away. And you end up with a really little different cute idea to the swirl.

Decorating fairy cakes with smooth butter cream icing

Then for the third technique using butter cream icing, take another fairy cake, I’ve just got some pink icing here that I made using red colouring, just add as much as you want to for your desired colour.

Then get the little pallet knife and you want to use the case to help you spread on the actual icing itself. So you just move that around. I might put a little bit more on there, good to be a little bit generous, and again move your case around, not your pallet knife. So you do that. This is when you rotate the case in your hand and use the pallet knife just to smooth it off a little bit like so and to cover it all. And then at the end you can just go back over it until you are happy.

So there we go, we’ve got three different ideas using butter cream icing.

How to decorate fairy cakes with ready-made icing

The fourth technique is to use ready-made icing that you just roll out between two pieces of cling wrap like I’ve done here. Put the icing on top, put another piece of cling wrap on top of that and then what you do is you roll it out to your desired thickness. And then it saves on any mess on the work surface.

So I’ve chosen to do black and yellow, bit of a bumble bee theme. And what you want to do is take the fairy cake that you want to decorate. I’m going to use some cutters; I’ve got round ones and some star ones. You just want to make sure you get a cutter the right size to fit just inside the case itself.

So I think I’m going to do a black disc first of all. This is great you can get kids to help you. If you get them to roll it out, they can use the cutters etcetera and you can help them to put it on top. Now you don’t need to have anything to stick it on there. So position it on like that. And this is where you can have lots of fun. You can use maybe a star cutter with the yellow. And again we can just position that on the top like so. And you can see how simple it is to make a really striking design straight away. I’m just going to finish mine off with a little round black circle. So there’s a whole host of ideas you can do.

Fairy cake topping ideas

With the ones that I’ve done with butter cream icing, you can use any toppings. We’ve got little chocolate sprinkles here some coloured balls, mini marshmallows, I think I’m going to put a few chocolate sprinkles on there just to jazz that up a bit. And maybe some pink and white little marshmallows on top of there. I’ll just put them in the centre.

Again have as much fun as you like the kids love dipping into this and sprinkling them over. You see, mess everywhere, that’s what we love. And there you’ve got some pretty little ideas. We’ve even got some sweets here that you can buy and you can pop those on as well. So over here we’ve got a little selection of what I’ve done. And there we go, easy as that.